(USA/UK, 99 min.)
Dir. Chan-wook Park, Writ. Wentworth Miller
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, Nicole Kidman,
Phyllis Somerville, Jacki Weaver, Dermot Mulroney.
Chan-wook Park spins an elaborate spider web with Stoker. A spider web is a strange,
spindly thing. It can be ugly, repulsive even, if it’s found in the wrong
place. (Your tooth brush, maybe.) Spider webs, however, can be beautiful if one
sees them in the proper place and if the light catches them just right. (Especially
if there’s a few water droplets to give the web some style.) Stoker, strangely, finds both the
ugliness and the beauty of the spider web, as the lines of the script leave
numerous gaps, which the director fortunately fills in with pizzazz. Stoker shows what an extremely talented
director can do with an intriguing, but sloppy script.
Penned by Prison Break
star Wentworth Miller, Stoker
displays ample promise for the actor to enjoy a second career as a writer.
Miller, who distributed the script under the pen name Ted Foulke, creates a
sinful soap opera as India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska, Lawless) loses her father (Dermot Mulroney) on her eighteenth
birthday. Papa Stoker’s demise is overshadowed by the return of his mysterious
younger brother Charlie (Matthew Goode), who strikes up a lewd relationship
with India’s mother, Evie (Nicole Kidman). Evie is a fantastically terrible
mother—shallow, self-absorbed, superficial—unlike India, who has a keen sense
for human intuition, which is accentuated by her unusually heightened hearing.
Why India has such a magical power is one of Stoker’s many mysterious. Her supernatural quality shoots plot holes
throughout this tawdry, incestuous romp, thus making Stoker both a clumsy and ridiculously entertaining labyrinth.
Catching the viewer in Stoker’s
web, though, is the film’s spellbinding atmosphere. Director Chan-wook Park,
making his English-language debut after his South-Korean sensations Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, fills Stoker’s plot holes with all sorts of aesthetic craziness. Stoker unloads a gaggle of literary and
cinematic references, alluding to Shadow
of a Doubt one moment and Carrie
the next. The atmosphere is very Macbeth-ish,
or maybe it’s a perverted whiff of King
Lear, and Stoker muddles its
footnotes in sensual madness. Sorta Hitchcockian, sorta Shakespearean, sorta
horrifying, sorta Gothic, Stoker is
an operatic potpourri of cinematic style.
The camerawork by Chung-hoon Chung distorts India’s world in
gloriously gratuitous twirls and whirls. Bathing the composition in warm
colours one moment and spooky shadows the next, Stoker avoids any easy route for deciphering its madness. Is this a
fairy-tale or a nightmare?
The performances themselves are equally, yet successfully,
all over the map. Wasikowska provides another enchanting young heroine, even
though (or because) it’s impossible to read whether India is falling into the
rabbit hole or whether she is pushing her family members in. Matthew Goode, on
the other hand, is charming to a fault, as he makes Uncle Charlie a suave
sociopath/ playboy or operator type in his attempt to seduce and initiate India
into the family secret. Nicole Kidman, meanwhile, plays villain and victim both
in her impressively cold turn as Evie. Kidman’s performance, much as it did in The Paperboy, proves instrumental in
decoding the Stoker family mystery.
Evie seems like a woman wholly incapable of love. It’s
strange, though, that the first introduction to Mrs. Stoker lets Kidman enjoy a
histrionic geyser of tears and fan-waving as Evie puts on a show for the
attendants of her husband’s funeral. Back at the family home—a grand, Southern
estate—Evie immediately takes a shine to Charlie and flirts with indecent
abandon. Her husband is dead and she can move on.
Evie eventually becomes a tragic figure—and this is where
the Shakespearean element comes into play—when Charlie infects her daughter
with a taste for blood and, like Lady Macbeth, Evie can’t wash her hands of the
situation. The film culminates in climatic feat of scene-chewing for Kidman
that sees Evie renounce her daughter in a cold, angry disavowal. The
unrepentant hate in Evie’s icy stare is palpable. Some mothers eat their young.
Some spiders, however, eat their partners after sex. It’s
usually the females. Perhaps Evie’s fury at her daughter relates not to India’s
aloofness, but to a jealous rivalry for Charlie’s affection.
Stoker pairs
India’s bloodlust with her own sexual ripening. The death of her father on the
date she enters adulthood cannot be unrelated to the smoldering sensation she
gets from her uncle’s creepy stare. Like Carrie, India is blossoming into a
monster.
Why India Stoker is an innate killing machine remains a
mystery. It’s one of the many plot holes in Stoker
that both baffles and adds to the experience. Unravelling Stoker’s web is its greatest pleasure—especially when you get
tangled up in it and watch as it comes in for the kill.
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Stoker is currently playing in Toronto.
